As a manager, you look at lead time, margin and utilization. What you see far less often is the work that quietly eats away at all of that: the repetitive manual tasks your engineers do in Autodesk Inventor every day. Exporting a set of drawings to PDF. Retyping a bill of materials into Excel. Cleaning up a model before it goes out the door. Each task seems like nothing on its own. Together they are a hidden cost that appears nowhere on your dashboard.
In this article we make those costs measurable and show you exactly where you can save time in Inventor. We work through it transparently, explicitly as an assumption, with you filling in your own numbers, to show what manual export, BOM and cleanup work costs a team. And we do it without you having to overhaul the way you work.
Why repetitive work stays invisible
The problem with repetitive work is not that it takes a long time. The problem is that it takes a short time, happens often and is accepted by everyone as "part of the job". Nobody logs an hours line for "12 clicks to publish a drawing". It disappears into the margins of an engineering day.
On top of that, this work usually lands on your most expensive people. An experienced designer cranking out PDFs in batches or copying bills of materials is, at that moment, doing work that requires no design knowledge. You are paying an engineering rate for administration. And you pay a second time, because those same hours are not going to the work where your margin actually is: designing, solving, helping customers move forward.
The third hidden cost is the risk of errors. Manual exporting and retyping goes wrong eventually. A wrong revision in the package, a DXF that did not come along, a bill of materials with a shifted row. Production grinds to a halt, a phone call goes back and forth, someone tracks down what went wrong. That rework is logged nowhere, but it is real, and it often costs more than the minutes you thought you were saving.
The calculation example: make the cost of repetitive work measurable
Let's make it concrete. The numbers below are explicitly an assumption: an example to show the structure. Replace them with your own figures and within five minutes you have an estimate for your own team.
Suppose your team consists of 5 engineers. Work it through with a fully loaded hourly rate of EUR 60 (salary plus overhead, not a billing rate, simply what an internal hour costs you). And suppose an engineer spends roughly 45 minutes per working day on pure repetitive manual work: converting documents to PDF/DWG/DXF/STEP, transferring bills of materials to Excel, cleaning up models and browsers, opening and closing files in assemblies.
That may sound like a lot or a little, and that is why it is an assumption you need to calibrate yourself. But work through what it adds up to if it holds:
| Item | Assumption | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Repetitive work per engineer/day | 45 min | 0.75 hour |
| Working days per year (per engineer) | ±220 | 165 hours/year |
| Team of 5 engineers | 5 × | 825 hours/year |
| Fully loaded hourly rate | EUR 60 | - |
| Hidden cost per year | 825 × 60 | EUR 49,500 |
Almost fifty thousand euros per year, for a team of five, on work that nobody consciously plans. And that is only the direct time. The error costs and the lost design capacity are not even in there yet.
Scale it up or down and the pattern holds. Ten engineers? Double it. An hour a day instead of 45 minutes? Add a third on top. The point is not the exact amount: the point is that a "small" piece of manual work per person adds up to a serious item once you multiply it by your team and by a full year.
Where you can save time in Inventor
To understand where you can save time in Inventor, you need to know where it leaks away. In practice, we keep seeing the same actions come up.
Publishing documents
Assembling a production package means repeating the same sequence of actions for every drawing: open, export to PDF, then to DWG, maybe a DXF for laser cutting, a STEP for the supplier, into the right folder, the right naming. A row of clicks per document. With an assembly of dozens of drawings, that mounts up fast. The claim "1 click instead of 12 steps" is precisely about this, and "48 PDFs in 6 seconds" shows what happens when you stop doing it manually. This is exactly what Batch Publish does, in a single step, and it works together with Autodesk Vault.
Bills of materials to Excel
Purchasing and work preparation want a bill of materials in a fixed format. So you export the BOM, paste it into a template, tidy up columns, check that nothing has shifted. Every time again, for every assembly. It is exactly the kind of work where you pay attention rather than think, and that is precisely where errors creep in. BOM Export puts your bill of materials straight into a fixed template, making that verification pass unnecessary.
Cleaning up models and assemblies
Before a model goes out the door, you want no leftover sketch geometry, no clutter in the browser, no loose ends. Cleaning up manually is meticulous work that takes time and is easily skipped under pressure, with the result that you pass the problem on to the next person who opens the file. Model Cleaner removes that leftover geometry and tidies up the browser.
Opening and closing files
In a large assembly, opening the right components, changing something, closing them again seems trivial, but with hundreds of components you spend a fair part of your day navigating instead of designing. With Batch Open & Close you open and close those files in one go.
Run the numbers for your own team, and then experience the difference for yourself. No credit card, no obligations, just thirty days to see what it saves in your daily work.
Try 30 days freeFrom hidden costs to ROI
The next step for you as a manager is to finish the calculation: not just what it costs, but what it yields when you take that manual work away. Thundercad is the toolbox for Autodesk Inventor that automates exactly these repetitive jobs, with Batch Publish for publishing all your production documents in a single step, BOM Export for bills of materials in a fixed template, Model Cleaner for cleanup, and Batch Open & Close for quickly opening and closing files in assemblies.
Put the costs alongside the price. Thundercad costs EUR 30 per user per month, or EUR 300 per user per year (that is two months free), excluding VAT, per seat. For our example team of five engineers:
| Item | Calculation | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden cost of repetitive work (assumption) | see above | EUR 49,500 |
| Thundercad, 5 seats (annual price) | 5 × EUR 300 | EUR 1,500 |
You do not even have to bring the manual work all the way down to zero for this to add up. Suppose, again an assumption, that you win back half of those 45 minutes per engineer per day. Then you are talking about around EUR 24,000 in recovered capacity per year, against EUR 1,500 in costs. The question is not whether it pays off, but what you are going to do with those recovered hours.
And that is where it gets interesting for you. Those hours do not disappear, they shift. From administration to design. From running packages to finishing projects. From waiting on rework to fewer errors at the source, because an automated export does the same thing every time.
How to save time in Inventor without risk
Making an investment decision based on an assumption feels uncomfortable, and rightly so. The good thing is that you can test the assumption before you spend anything. Thundercad has a trial period of 30 days, free and without a credit card. You need Windows 10 or 11, Autodesk Inventor 2025 or newer, and an active Autodesk account. If you work with Autodesk Vault, Batch Publish works together with it; via the Dashboard you can connect the tools to your ERP and other software if you wish.
During that month, pick one concrete process that you recognize from the calculation example. Have a few engineers run their production packages with Batch Publish for a while instead of manually, and have them note how much time it saves. Do the same with BOM Export for the bills of materials. At the end of the month you no longer have an assumption, but your own figures, and with that a well-founded decision.
That is how you turn an invisible cost into something measurable, and a measurable cost into a choice. For completeness: a number of tools are still on the roadmap, such as Batch Flat Pattern, Find Item, a Drawing Checker/Cleaner and a Drawing Updater. The items that already touch your calculation example, namely publishing, bills of materials, cleanup, opening and closing, are available today.
If you want to dig deeper into the tools, take a look in the knowledge base or on the website to see exactly what is included.
Frequently asked questions
How much time can you realistically save in Inventor?
That depends on how much repetitive export, BOM and cleanup work your team currently does manually. The most honest approach is to track it for a week and then use the trial period to measure your own savings. The claims "1 click instead of 12 steps" and "48 PDFs in 6 seconds" give an indication of the order of magnitude for Batch Publish.
Does Thundercad pay for itself?
Run the math with your own numbers: team size, estimated minutes of manual work per engineer per day and your fully loaded hourly rate, against EUR 300 per seat per year. In the example above, EUR 1,500 in costs stands against a hidden cost of tens of thousands of euros. You only have to take away a fraction of that manual work to come out ahead.
What do I need to get started?
Windows 10 or 11, Autodesk Inventor 2025 or newer and an active Autodesk account. You can try it free for 30 days without a credit card. If you work with Autodesk Vault, that works together; connecting to your ERP is possible via the Dashboard.